Mary Toft; or, the Rabbit Queen

by Dexter Palmer

  “And they are so certain that Patience and I are false—some kind of dishonest illusion. I can feel their rage when it happens—a heat on my face, as if I’ve opened a stove’s door to look in on the flames.”

  “The curtain that separates us is as much for us as it is for them, you see,” said Patience. “It is hard enough to have someone doubt your very existence when you cannot make out his face so clearly—without that, it would be worse.”

  “To be doubted so strongly leads you to doubt yourself,” said Grace, “but when we are alone together, we can count the things that tell us we are real—our own voices; our own skin; our own heart; our own breath. We can do this service for each other, as sisters—breathe life into each other.”

  “But I don’t know what we would do if we were one instead of two,” said Patience, and she turned her head to look at Mary with genuine pity.

  “Vanish, I suppose,” Patience said. “Float away on the wind.”

  * * *

  *

  The next morning, one of the two constables who’d brought Grace and Patience in the night before unlocked the door to Mary’s cell and beckoned to her. “Your case has been dismissed. You’re free to go,” he said simply, and though surprised at this—she imagined that at the least there’d be some sort of trial, that she wouldn’t get out into the world again so easily—she came to her feet.

  “We wish you the best of luck,” said Grace, and she and Patience folded Mary in a long and warm embrace.

  “Isn’t this lovely,” the constable said. “I find myself wiping a tear away.”

  * * *

  *

  “Speaking for myself, I find what you did revolting,” the constable said to Mary as he led her past the cells of still sleeping women, through the dark maze of Bridewell’s halls that led to the exit. “But your body is yours to do with as you wish—there appears to be no statute preventing women from desecrating their bodies in such a particular and peculiar manner. And it is difficult to say that you truly defrauded someone, since you didn’t speak a lie—you merely did as you wished, and let the surgeons who tended to you draw their own conclusions.

  “Besides,” he said as they approached the wide double doors of this prison that, in a century past, had been a palace, “it appears that enough people of station would prefer this tale be forgotten to ensure a lack of will to revisit it in a court of law; any further punishment you receive would be more than matched by the lash of the satirist’s pen, directed at those you duped. And so you are free.”

  He slid back the large iron bolt of the heavy double doors before him and pushed. With a groan of old hinges, they swung open, revealing a crack of light beyond and the noise and stink of a London street.

  “What shall I do?” Mary said.

  “I don’t know,” the constable replied, “but you can’t stay here.”

  He’d pushed the doors open just wide enough for her to pass through. She took one tentative step and then another, and she heard the slam of the doors behind her and the shooting of the bolt, and she was free with the sky above her, the city before her.

  I don’t know what we would do if we were one instead of two. Vanish, I suppose.

  She drew her arms around herself in the January cold and thought of Joshua, that innocent victim of her notorious and vile hoax (though was there something that she was forgetting, or willing herself not to know? No—there was not). It was reasonable to think that a man would resent being so ill-used by his wife, so publicly embarrassed, but they were bound by love, and by their family, and by their need to use each other’s faces as mirrors, and she knew, if she returned to him, that he would be able to find it in his heart to forgive.

  * * *

  *

  So she set off alone into the great city, to try to make it home before she faded.

  Acknowledgments

  My thanks to my editor, Edward Kastenmeier, and my agent, Susan Golomb, for their support and enthusiasm for this somewhat unusual project. Thanks also to Caitlin Landuyt, Edward’s assistant; to Rose Cronin-Jackman, my publicist; and to Janet Hansen for her jacket design.

  Certain elements of this narrative resulted from conversations with Micaela Baranello, Stephanie Harves, and Jessica Terekhov.

  Thanks to Ann Laver and the librarians at the Godalming Museum for steering me in the right direction at the beginning of my research.

  Special thanks to a few people who made the time to read and comment on an early draft of this novel: Brett Douville, Maria Purves, and Drew Purves.

  I first encountered the tale of Mary Toft in the fall of 1996, in a class in graduate school at Princeton University taught by Jonathan Lamb (“Representation of the Improbable”). It’s been rattling around in my head ever since, and I’m glad I at last found something to do with it.

  For a couple of years now my friends have dreaded what happens when a stranger approaches me at a party and says, “You’re working on a novel? What’s it about?” Thanks for your patience, everyone.

  And thanks, as always, to my family, who have supported my writing career from the beginning and continue to do so.

  —DEXTER PALMER

  February 6, 2016

  May 6, 2019

  Princeton, New Jersey

  Bibliography

  It will be clear to anyone who reads this novel that I’ve taken a novelist’s liberties with its subject matter: I’ve condensed and invented characters and freely rendered their thoughts; rearranged locations (most notably moving John Howard’s residence from Guilford to Godalming); altered history and created new situations; and imported one event in particular that didn’t take place during the exact time period (the “Chelsea Cat-Eater” did not perform the act that earned him his title until 1790; see Jane Moore and John Strachan, Key Concepts in Romantic Literature [New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010], p. 60). For a strictly historically accurate version of the Mary Toft story, I refer readers in particular to Dennis Todd’s invaluable book Imagining Monsters: Miscreations of the Self in the Eighteenth Century (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1995), and to S. A. Seligman’s article “Mary Toft—The Rabbit Breeder,” Medical History 5, no. 4 (October 1961): 349–60. In addition, Dennis Todd’s transcript of Mary Toft’s three confessions (originally recorded by Dr. James Douglas in December 1726) is available, as of the time of this writing, at https://tofts3confessions.wordpress.com/.

  Chapter V incorporates material from Aristotle’s Compleat Master-Piece, in Three Parts: Displaying the Secrets of Nature in the Generation of Man: Regularly Digested into Chapters and Sections, Rendering It Far More Useful Than Any Yet Extant: To Which Is Added, A Treasure of Health, Or, The Family Physician: Being Choice and Approved Remedies for All the Distempers Incident to Human Bodies (London: Printed and sold by the booksellers, 1728).

  The first half of the retelling of “The King and the Three Impostors” in Chapter XIII is a heavy rewrite of the version of the tale that appears in Count Lucanor; Or, The Fifty Pleasant Stories of Patronio, Written by the Prince Don Juan Manuel and First Done into English by James York, M.D., 1868. The second half is my own invention.

  Chapter XXI incorporates material from Nathanael St. André, A Short Narrative of an Extraordinary Delivery of Rabbets, Perform’d by Mr. John Howard, Surgeon at Guilford (London: John Clarke, 1727, second edition). All writing attributed to St. André, Ahlers, and Manningham elsewhere in the novel is my own invention.

  I am also indebted to the following works, for reasons ranging from providing a general overview of English history, to supplying useful details of the period about which I was writing, to influencing the way I thought about the characters. Divergences from historical fact are mine, not theirs:

  Apple, Jr., R. W. “Much Ado About Mutton, but Not in These Parts.” New York Times, March 29, 2006.

  Bayne-Powell, Rosamond. The English Child i
n the Eighteenth Century. New York: E. P. Dutton and Company, 1939.

  Bensley, B. A. Practical Anatomy of the Rabbit. Eighth edition. Edited by E. Horne Craigie. Philadelphia: Blakiston Company, 1948.

  Black, Jeremy. The Hanoverians: The History of a Dynasty. London and New York: Hambledon and London, 2004.

  Blackmore, Sir Richard. Discourses on the Gout, a Rheumatism, and the King’s Evil, Containing an Explication of the Nature, Causes and Different Species of Those Diseases, and the Method of Curing Them. London: J. Pemberton, 1726.

  Blanning, Tim. The Pursuit of Glory: Europe 1648–1815. New York: Viking, 2007.

  Boyer, Abel. The Political State of Great Britain, Volume XXXII. Containing the Months of July, August, September, October, November, and December, MDCCXXVI. London: Printed for the author, 1726.

  Brogan, Stephen. The Royal Touch in Early Modern England: Politics, Medicine, and Sin. Woodbridge, Suffolk, and Rochester, New York: Boydell Press, 2015.

  Cheyne, George. The Natural Method of Cureing the Diseases of the Body, and the Disorders of the Mind Depending on the Body. London: George Strahan and John and Paul Knapton, 1742.

  Cruickshank, Dan. The Secret History of Georgian London. London: Random House Books, 2009.

  Davidson, Ian. Voltaire: A Life. New York: Pegasus Books, 2010.

  Davies, Horton. Worship and Theology in England: From Watts and Wesley to Martineau, 1690–1900. Grand Rapids, MI, and Cambridge, UK: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1996.

  Defoe, Daniel. The Compleat English Tradesman. London: Charles Rivington, 1727.

  ———. A Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain. Abridged and edited with an introduction and notes by Pat Rogers. London: Penguin Books, 1971.

  ———. Moll Flanders. Edited with an introduction and notes by David Blewett. London: Penguin Books, 1989.

  ———. Roxana. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.

  Dillon, Patrick. Gin: The Much-Lamented Death of Madam Geneva. Boston, MA: Justin, Charles and Co., 2002.

  Edison Electric Illuminating Company of Boston. The History of Stage and Theater Lighting. 1929.

  “The Free-Thinker.” Considerations on the Nature, Causes, Cure, and Prevention of Pestilences. London: W. Wilkins, 1721.

  Gibson, William. “ ‘Pious Decorum’: Clerical Wigs in the Eighteenth-Century Church of England.” Anglican and Episcopal History 65, no. 2 (June 1996): 145–61.

  Giffard, William. Cases in Midwifry. London: B. Motte and T. Wotton, 1734.

  Glasse, Hannah. The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy. London: J. Rivington and Sons, 1788.

  Grano, John. Handel’s Trumpeter: The Diary of John Grano. Edited by John Ginger, with a foreword by Crispin Steele-Perkins. Stuyvesant, NY: Pendragon Press, 1998.

  Harvey, A. D. Sex in Georgian England: Attitudes and Prejudices from the 1720s to the 1820s. London: Duckworth and Co., 1994.

  Harvey, Karen. “What Mary Toft Felt: Women’s Voices, Pain, Power, and the Body.” History Workshop Journal 80 (September 2015): 33–51.

  Hatton, Ragnhild. George I: Elector and King. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978.

  Heister, D. Laurentius. A Compendium of Anatomy, Containing a Short but Perfect View of All the Parts of Humane Bodies. London: Thomas Combes, 1721.

  Heister, Laurence. A General System of Surgery in Three Parts. Fourth edition. London: W. Innys, 1750.

  Hogarth, William. Engravings by Hogarth. Edited by Sean Shesgreen. New York: Dover Publications, 1973.

  Inglis, Lucy. Georgian London: Into the Streets. London: Penguin Books, 2014.

  Kuitenbrower, Kathryn. “Mary Toft, Eighteenth-Century Breeder of Story.” Brick 91 (summer 2013): 140.

  Lane, Joan. Apprenticeship in England, 1600–1914. London: UCL Press, 1996.

  Locke, John. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Edited with an introduction and notes by Roger Woolhouse. London: Penguin Books, 2004.

  Lynch, Jack. Deception and Detection in Eighteenth-Century Britain. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2008.

  Makari, George. Soul Machine: The Invention of the Modern Mind. New York and London: W. W. Norton and Company, 2015.

  Manningham, Sir Richard. An Exact Diary of What Was Observ’d During a Close Attendance Upon Mary Toft, the Pretended Rabbet-Breeder of Godalming in Surrey, from Monday, Nov. 28 to Wednesday, December 7, Following. Together with an Account of Her Confession of the Fraud. London: Fletcher Gyles, 1726.

  ———. The Plague No Contagius Disease: Or, The Infection of the Plague Seldom, if Ever, Communicated by Touching of Persons Infected, or of Goods Brought from Infected Places. London: J. Millan, 1744.

  Marlow, Joyce. The Life and Times of George I. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1973.

  Marshall, Ashley. “Did Defoe Write Moll Flanders and Roxana?” Philological Quarterly 89, no. 203 (spring-summer 2010): 209–41.

  Medical Essays and Observations. Revised and published by a society in Edinburgh. London: T. and W. Ruddimans, 1737.

  Miller, Joseph. Botanicum Officinale; Or, A Compendious Herbal: Giving an Account of All Such Plants As Are Now Used in the Practice of Physick, with Their Descriptions and Virtues. London: E. Bell, 1722.

  O’Donoghue, Geoffrey. Bridewell Hospital: Palace, Prison, Schools, from the Death of Elizabeth to Modern Times. London: John Lane, 1929.

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  Porter, Roy. English Society in the Eighteenth Century. Revised edition. London: Penguin Books, 1991.

  Robbins, Hollis. “The Emperor’s New Critique.” New Literary History 34, no. 4 (autumn 2003): 659–75.

  Rudé, George. Hanoverian London 1714–1808. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1971.

  Spencer, Herbert R. The History of British Midwifery from 1650 to 1800. London: John Bale, Sons and Danielson, Ltd., 1927.

  Styles, John. The Dress of the People: Everyday Fashion in Eighteenth-Century England. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2007.

  Tauvry, Daniel. A New Rational Anatomy, Containing an Explication of the Uses of the Structure of the Body of Man and Some Other Animals, According to the Rules of Mechanicks. London: D. Midwinter, 1701.

  Thomas, Keith. Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England 1500–1800. London: Penguin Books, 1984.

  ———. Religion and the Decline of Magic. London: Penguin Books, 1991.

  Tombs, Robert. The English and Their History. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2015.

  Vickers, William. An Easie and Safe Method for Curing the King’s Evil. London: S. Manship, 1713.

  Vickery, Amanda. Behind Closed Doors: At Home in Georgian England. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2009.

  Voltaire. Philosophical Letters; Or, Letters Regarding the English Nation. Edited and with an introduction by John Leigh. Translated by Prudence L. Steiner. Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, 2007.

  von Uffenbach, Zacharias Conrad. London in 1710. Translated by W. H. Quarrell and Margaret Mare. London: Faber and Faber Limited, 1934.

  White, Jerry. A Great and Monstrous Thing: London in the Eighteenth Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995.

  Wilson, Adrian. The Making of Man-Midwifery: Childbirth in England, 1660–1770. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995.

  ———. Ritual and Conflict: The Social Relations of Childbirth in Early Modern England. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2013.

  Worsley, Lucy. If Walls Could Talk: An Intimate History of the Home. London: Faber and Faber Limited, 2011.

  A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Dexter Palmer is the author of two previous novels: Version Control, which was selected as one of the best novels of 2016 by GQ, the San Francisco Chronicle, and other publications, and The Dr
eam of Perpetual Motion, which was selected as one of the best fiction debuts of 2010 by Kirkus Reviews. He lives in Princeton, New Jersey.

  www.dexterpalmer.com

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